My daughter, Leilani, has tons of Goldfinches in there place. I’ve had none. Zero. Well, I saw one brightly colored male one this spring, but he went elsewhere. Leilani suggested that we switch to hulled sunflower seed to see if that would increase our Goldfinch population. So we did. And now my motto is, if you do that, they will come. Not only will a few of them come, but they will bring their entire ʻohana, calabash cousins, and anybody else that they happen to see.
Goldfinches are now eating us out of house and home. The seed is really expensive, and the inside hulls are messy. But having all these guys around is helping to brighten up my days, so to me, it’s worth it. Even though I have two feeders with the seeds up, the birdies fight and argue over who’s going to get to them first. There’s a lot of action at the feeders. There are so many Goldfinches that they can empty a tube feeder in about a day and a half. We can’t afford to keep filling yet another feeder, so the sweet birdies are going to have to keep trying to settle it among themselves. It seems like every day brings more of them. Am I sorry I started this? Nope. Not at all.
(If you turn the sound way up, you can hear them arguing about who gets to kapu the perches on the feeder.)
